


The Gem Shall Be His Portal

by TheLightdancer



Category: Teen Titans (Animated Series), The Sandman (Comics)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:14:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23845783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: In the wake of the coming of Trigon to the Earth, Raven finds herself in limbo before her rebirth in the new realm Trigon made. There, she meets two faces that seem strangely familiar and learns of the whims and ironies of Destiny.
Relationships: Raven & Trigon (DCU), Raven (DCU) & Death of the Endless
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	The Gem Shall Be His Portal

THE TEMPLE OF THE CULT OF BLOOD, BENEATH JUMP CITY: 

The temple itself was a decaying and unhallowed place, the result of furtive and terrible acts that had drawn their architect to flee when he had realized his attempts to con his followers brought forth something greater and far worse than he. A shadowy place, a realm out of time and space, it reeked with the brimstone odors of Pandaemonium and the low insect-like droning of the Other-sphere, the multi-planed realm ruled now by Remiel and Duma, once the fiefdom of the Morningstar, Fallen and First among them. A young girl, sixteen years, strode up a vast clawed stone hand, a sphere of her soul shielding her friends. Behind it pained cries for her to stop and the blows of sonic weapons, firebolts, the ramming of a Tyrannosaurus rex awoken from the deep courses of geologic time, and birdarangs were the chorus of grief heralding each leaden step.

A voice thrummed beneath the droning, tectonic and gleeful, an infrasound element that finally stilled the team, and left the alien that had hurled the starbolts in grief and fury to turn to her (to her quietly so, not so much to her friends, no....her family....) hidden beloved.

The girl levitated, runes beginning to glow with a blood-red hue, and the shadowy place outside of time was lit with a hellish light that brought light to the darkness, a light that did not dispel it but drank it greedily and glutted it. She hovered in the lotus positions, hands forming a gesture of mystic power, and then began an incantation:

_**The Gem was born of Evil's Fire** _

The runes began to leave her body and formed a sphere, some drinking in the darkness along the walls, others forming in mid-air, hanging and the darkness seeming to vanish and to make the blood-hue both brighter and more terrifyingly sickly at the same time.

**_The Gem shall be his Portal._ **

Light began to gleam from her sacral chakra, a bright white light, the white of a grave-shroud. Its gleam was as fundamentally _wrong_ as that of the runes, but in a different way. The runes drank in the darkness and it made them stronger. This did not follow any property known to photons, nor mirror light in truth and its brightness was the terrible glow of an atomic bomb come to shatter physics around it in fire and wind and the elemental fury of Promethean flame.

_**He comes to claim, he comes to sire......** _

The light began to engulf her, leaving only her head exposed above it and visible, the last trace of her body, a penny in her hand falling from the sphere of glowing hell-light and making its impact known with a clinking sound, four times. To the team it was the chiming of the clock that heralded the end of time.

**_The end of all things Mortal!_ **

The last words, at that time, that they believed they would hear their friend state were drowned in the sudden eruption of a new and terrible sun in the Earth at that point. On the Watchtower, the mystic alarms that had drawn the Justice League Dark to the League proper, trying to convince them of the seriousness of the threat began to audibly shriek as a new sun erupted on the West Coast of the United States. A vast clawed hand erupted, red in hue and dripping with the malice of ancient evil rewrought into a primordial form, an antlered titan glutted on the souls of the realm whose erroneous quests for morality in a pure sense had birthed a colossal Mr. Hyde in lieu of the angelic force that they had hoped would be born instead. The hand slammed into the ground, shattering the stone one wrought in its image and likeness, then was followed by a second, equally sized.

A monstrous head erupted, smiling with vast fangs the size of skyscrapers, a vast pronged set of antlers in crude emulation of a Megaloceros emerging from either side of the demon's head. As it stepped from the newborn sun its portal had summoned, it rose, a giant towering over the city that gazed on it in brief and stupefied horror. The mystical wave caused the Justice League Dark to fall to the ground, stunned, clasping their heads in the wave of malice produced. The Green Lantern Corps agents sent en route were diverted to the nearest inhabitable star to Earth lest the terrible wave that was about to befall it shatter the rest.

That tectonic bellow echoed in a single primordial howl:

_**The Earth! Is! Mine!** _

From him echoed a wave of power, Marring the Earth and rendering it in the image of his circle, the Malebolge. The Demon Trigon, known in some realities as Malebolgia, in others as the Dread Dormammu, in others as Scath and Ddrez, in still others as Allluminas, took his first step onto the Earth, smiling in satisfaction as the wave rippled outward and the Earth burned, become a hellscape of terrible proportions, buildings shattered, oceans boiled away.....and the entire population rendered into stone fully aware of the nature of that transformation, monuments to his new ascension. His hour come round at last, the great beast stepped to a T-shaped tower that had been blasted to a brick, sensing a room that was capable, however briefly, of containing the power of his birth though in a matter of hours he would have burned it out regardless.

Staring at it, the demon huffed and then sat down, shrinking his size to a point that he was able to rest from the effort of remaking the world. He had just become the new Presence, there was all the time in the world to wait.

THE FOOTHILLS OF THE SUNLESS LANDS:

Raven awoke.

"This isn't Hell."

She looked around. It was a place vast and dark and cold, a cold that made her immaterial breath mist, and she clutched herself, shivering. Aware that she had failed, for all that she had tried, and committed a horrible act that nothing could possibly atone for, her tears flowed freely. A memory came to mind: 

_The day before she'd left Azarath, her mother came to see her. Angela's hair was her same violet hue, as were her eyes. Her Hakka* features were, however, those aside from this of a normal human woman. Once adopted by the Roth family of San Francisco+, Arella had found that the neighboring muncipality of Jump City had concealed dreadful Lovecraftian secrets in the subterranean vaults. And for all of that, for all of her awareness of what her daughter was, of who she was, of her predetermined path, Angela could not resist a mother's love, nor the temptation she yielded to of putting her arms around her as Raven cried._

_"I can't endanger Azarath, mom. I have to go to Earth."_

_A monk who was fully reliant on belief in the path of the Azar's order would have tried to dissuade her._

_A mother who loved and trusted her daughter could only nod, and tell her, "I know. I understand. I cannot follow. Earth.....has nothing for me anymore."_

_Raven nodded, her eyes meeting her mother's._

_"I won't stop you, Raven. I will give you my blessing, though I do not believe the prophecy can be stopped. It is the last time we will ever see each other, so...."_

_She hugged her again._

_"I love you," words whispered into her ear and spoken for the first, and for the longest time, only, time in her life._

_And now she was alone in the freezing void. Tears rolling down her cheeks, and silent keening following them._

_For what seemed hours she wailed, until she heard a voice. It was like a human voice, but an ideal one, calm and eternally friendly and welcoming. And oddly youthful._

**You look very lonely and cold.**

She whirled. Next to her stood someone paler than she. Her skin was a bright grey, an ash-hue, but had some trace of melanin. This....girl's....appearance was that of bleached bone, hair of flowing darkness and eyes that shone with, at first, the glowing power of blazing suns before she shook her head in stupefied disbelief, settling into the appearance of friendly darkness. Beneath the right eye was an eye of Horus. She was a very young girl, Raven's own age, clad in a midriff-bearing tank top, wearing black pants, a black belt, and a bright silver ankh.

Raven immediately bowed.

"Death of the Endless, Mistress of Life and Death, I bo-"

Death laughed, and it was a friendly laugh.

**I have not come to collect you, Raven daughter of Angela Roth.**

She blinked.

"You know my mother's birth name?"

**I know everyone. I have not collected the souls of Azarath either. It is.....a special place to me. From a very long time ago.**

Her smile was soft for a moment, even nostalgic.

**It is that kind of place, but that is not why it is not your time.**

"Then...I'm not dead?"

**Your body is dead, your first one.**

"But I am not?"

Death's smile was the kindliest she had ever seen, much moreso than Azar herself:

**No, not yet. All that is or will ever be will come to me, in the end. There shall be but two entities left at the end of time. My older brother, and I. But I am not your death, not yet. You shall live centuries yet, become more than you could have ever imagined. And have a freedom you could have never imagined, the ability to choose your own destiny.**

"I.....I was told...."

**I know what you were told, Raven.**

Death smiled.

**You remember when you took the ankh, a long time ago?**

Raven nodded.

AZARATH, EIGHT YEARS AGO:

_Raven moved furtively through the collection of mystic artifacts that her mentor had accumulated over the centuries of her service as third and last Azar. There were symbols, strange ones. One, locked behind powerful wards permanently visible was the sigil of a two-headed dragon, the right head gnawing at the neck of the left. Another, to its right, was a sigil of lightning and smoke interwoven, wards still more powerful veiling it. Those were of such a nature of strangeness that even the thing within her that burbled and spoke with a voice more ancient than the mountains that made her so strange to other kids and incapable of ever being who most of her wanted to be shied from them and hissed, the hiss mirroring in her breath._

_She looked at artifacts that pulsed with power....and then stopped at a collection of seven. From right to left there was a sigil made of multi-hued gemstones that gleamed with light and it never looked the same no matter how many times she stared at it. A hook, sharp and wicked-looking. A golden heart, tantalizing and the kid within her ached for that one most though the demon looked upon it with wariness. A great sword, fearsome and the demon looked at this most avidly and respectfully, influencing her enough to make her bow even when she didn't understand why a pointy object was worth the fuss. A mask, insectoid and wicked-looking. The demon looked most fearfully at this one, making her head move so swiftly her jaw hurt._

_Then it. A sigil carefully made of a mixture of silver and chrome. An ankh, an ancient Khemetic symbol of life. To its left was a book in chains, but she did not really care for anything symbolizing a word that adults spoke around her angrily and made her flinch and the demon laugh in uproarious triumph. The child and the demon alike took the ankh in their hands. An ankh, symbol of she whom the demon had once tried to make his consort and been banished into nothingness for his troubles. He had neither forgotten nor forgiven the slight and when unleashed in full, he intended to visit onto the uppity little Endless the same treatment he had given Arella._

_A child of eight hearing such ranting and screaming from her demonic side, which was not Rage, not really, it was beneath her. Lower, darker, like a mountain wading in the sea with its head above the clouds, or the stygian abyss of the oceanic depth, did not understand it, nor really care. This sigil was cold but pretty, echoing in warmth. She held it, and then two voices spoke._

_One was the worried one of Azar, saying:_

Raven, put that down, now!

_The other a low and dulcet comforting voice saying:_

**Well hello, there. You're a strong one, aren't you?**

The memory faded, and she looked at the person who spoke with that same voice:

"I....I remember you."

Death's smile was as kindly as ever.

**I remember you, too. One of the very few mortals who could have taken an artifact meant to honor one of us and used it to call us as one of us might have done. And now here you are, alone and cold and fearful that your life is over.**

Raven nodded.

An arm went around her shoulder, slender, but with a surpassing strength.

**Come on, dear. My apartment is not far away and it is warm. You like tea, yes?**

"I do," Raven murmured in bemused fashion, eyes wide.

They came to a door and Death's arm moved off of her, opening it. The light was brilliant but welcoming and Raven crossed the threshold.

"For a realm of one of the Endless I.....kind of expected more."

Death's lip quirked.

**I am not my sibling, Desire, nor my brother Dream. Not a place for a singular entity nor a kingdom. Just an apartment.**

She pointed to a pair of goldfish, one on the left noticeably fatter than the other.

**The one on the left is slim, the one on the right is Wandsworth. Take a seat on the couch, Raven. Your tea will be ready in a few minutes.**

Not sure what to make of all this, Raven stepped cautiously and then sat on the couch, awed at how welcoming it was.

It was then that a voice spoke to her right:

_Hello, daughter of Trigon._

She flinched and then her eyes went still wider. He was a man clad in robes heavier than her own, her eyes invisible, and holding a book with chains that clinked in the wake of his motions.

She immediately left the couch to kneel again.

"Destiny of the Endless, I welcome y-"

Death turned the corner, three cups of tea prepared on a tray. She froze for a second, face slightly shocked, then her affability restored itself.

**Hi big brother, I seldom see you out of your maze!**

_Circumstances dictate, sister._

Death's smile was warm.

**No doubt.**

She set the tray down, then handed him a cup.

**Your favorite, just as you like it.**

Destiny's nod was calm, and he took a sip and smiled.

Raven meekly relished her tea, ideal, perfect in a way nothing she could make would be. Time was indeterminate between Death and Destiny, and she did not care to to probe what it was and was not, nor to question why two of the most powerful entities in existence and kin at that sat with such a familiarly awkward silence between them. Eventually the moment stopped. It was Destiny who spoke first: 

**It is not her fate to stay here.**

Death sighed, an aura of annoyance palpable, then huffed.

**I realize that, brother. She has had a hard life with little in the way of genuine kindness. Stopping in for tea will hurt no-one and nothing.**

Destiny nodded, conceding the point.

_You are also lonely, sister. I....did not want you to try to solve that here._

Death's smile was briefly sadder.

**I know, brother. Del is right, you know. We all know what you do, we just try not to let ourselves see it.**

Destiny's gaze turned to Raven.

_My book for your world is nowhere near complete, daughter of Trigon. Your father lied to you about many things, and you shall come to understand that with time._

Destiny's face never showed his eyes but Raven felt helpless, a bug on a plate. She had always thought her father, or that brief encounter with Death, were the strongest entities she could have encountered. And then Destiny himself stood before her.

"You.....you are....."

 _I am bound to watch, daughter of Trigon, neither to judge nor to interfere. What you see as power is that of seeing the greater stories that hold all things together. Yet in all things I seek to give mortals more freedom to live and to decide the course of their fates, not less._

Destiny smiled.

_And in that sense, daughter of Trigon, my sister is correct. You have known so little kindness outside that given to you by your family of choice you do not know how to respond to it when freely given. You brought the Demon here, to the pages of my book where the Earth is concerned focused purely upon him._

Death spoke, now:

**But you can try to change that fate, and to fix it.**

"Can....can that be done?"

**Of course it can.**

Death's smile was welcoming.

**That prophecy said he would come to claim and sire, it never said he was destined to triumph.**

"I.....I gave my friends a small touch of my power, to try to fix things."

Death smiled still more broadly.

**Raven, they cannot fix it alone, and you have not broken anything beyond its power to repair. You have given me a blessed few days off from my job.**

She startled Raven by coming over to give her a tight hug that rivaled anything of Starfire's.

**Believe me, vacations are so infrequent that giving me one would be reason enough to see the person capable of doing it.**

She smiled. Then for a moment her eyes seemed to become as stars that burned with a brilliant glow and Raven trembled slightly.

**Besides, I remember your father all too well from many billions of years ago, when the star Sol was brand new, and a stripling among its kind. I want him not merely broken this time, I want him destroyed, and when I meet him at the end of his course, I will be able to remind him what price pride and destruction gain him.**

The smile returned to her face and her eyes, those welcoming abysses of Old Night, were back to their hypnotic selves.

**And you, Raven, will be a key part in making that so.**

A third figure came, as Destiny nodded to him.

_Brother Dream._

**Brother Destiny.**

Dream of the Endless was a tall and towering being, thin, as thin as the Scarecrow. Tallest of the three entities and personifications, his eyes were starlight skies and Raven felt she could drown in them.

**Destiny sees the stories, I am the one that shapes them. Your father destroyed your body.**

Dream's smile changed and it was the kind that reminded Raven that nightmares as well as the more pleasant dreams were the domain of the Lord Shaper.

**So then shall it be seen how he fares against a new one made not by his sorcery and your mother's unknown curse, but by the Endless.**

TRIGON'S CITADEL:

Raven awoke, a child in body though not in mind. She had remembered, vaguely, Dream forming a body out of the dust of the ground and then Death leaning over her mouth and breathing into her body the breath of life that re-established a link of body and soul. Death had turned likewise to see a figure that stood staring at her, singular eye wide with shock.

"Slade?" It was a single startled word and Slade moved with that same jerking zombie-shape elsewhere.

TITAN'S TOWER, IN THE WAKE OF THE FINAL BATTLE: 

Trigon, bereft of his power and of his essence, found himself reverted to a form taller and broader than man-height but not by that much. His gaze whirled around to see a figure as red-skinned as he was, with eyes that blazed with starlight, and a smile cold and welcoming.

**Hello, Trigon, son of Azarath.**

**_YOU!_ **

**Yes, me.**

She extended her hand.

**Come, it is your time.**

Helpless to resist the compelling mental force of one of the Endless, Trigon complied. And Death could not resist a satisfied smile that the entity who had once tried to bind her had now fallen before her, and was taken to face the destiny that awaited him.

TITANS TOWER:

After returning to the Tower, the Titans paused when a portal opened. Raven whirled around. That portal was from Aza-her eyes fixed on a woman in white, wearing a hood and cloak like Raven's own, though her skin was the hue of a normal person's against her daughter's ash grey. Her mother smiled at her warmly.

"Mom?"

A single word, and then the mother and daughter rushed to hold each other on the day neither had ever hoped to see and both were awed into stupefied silence that it existed, and the universe's path continued.

MAZE OF DESTINY:

Turning the page in his book, Destiny allowed himself the luxury of a rare smile. He continued to read on, traversing the endless paths of his garden.

_____________________

*The Hakka are a people of China who speak a Chinese language in the eastern parts of today's PRC. They are most notable for providing both Hong Xiuquan, architect of the Taiping Rebellion, and the bulk of his armies. It's a headcanon of mine that cartoon Raven, due to her mother having clearly Asian features, comes from this people for reasons of irony and making Raven a foil of a real life historical figure, mostly. Historical geekery has its upsides.

+This relies on elements of the New Teen Titans background of Arella, plus the Johns era and the Rebirth era. In the New Teen Titans she was adopted with no true knowledge of her birth family, who are cousins of the Hong Xiuquan family of the 1850s in my headcanon. In this story's universe (and more broadly in any works featuring the 2003-verse), Arella is adopted by the Roth families and has her adoptive sister Alice Williams, who gets along with her better than she did with her parents and sees her as more of a relative than her parents, too.


End file.
